


If Only in My Dreams

by Deafen_the_Satellites



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: #DearCaptainAmerica, #YesVirginiaThereisaCaptainAmerica, Christmas, Epistolary, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Podfic Welcome, legacy, letters to Captain America
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:15:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21556090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deafen_the_Satellites/pseuds/Deafen_the_Satellites
Summary: This was originally submitted to Speranza's 2018 Advent Calendar,"Scenes from a Marriage: Mailbag"epistolary fiction challenge.  Part was excerpted in that fic (Ch. 18) but, in anticipation of the upcoming holiday season, I wanted to post the full version.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 26





	If Only in My Dreams

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Scenes From A Marriage: Mailbag](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16916457) by [Speranza](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Speranza/pseuds/Speranza). 



> Title from, _"I'll Be Home for Christmas" ___by Kim Gannon and Walter Kent (famously recorded by Bing Crosby).
> 
> Podfic welcome! Please ask me first in the comments.
> 
> For Big Daddy. Wherever you are.

Dear Captain America,

Wow. I really did just type that. I grew up reading about you, first in _Little Golden_ books, then in other children's books of American heroes and folklore. My daddy served during the War, it's how he met my mother- she was a WAC and she never let him forget that she briefly outranked him! Made Sgt. before him. 

He gave me a record with _Star Spangled Man with a Plan_ on it for my 2nd birthday. Used to play that for me along with the _Ballad of Davy Crockett._ I remember him pushing me on the swing, my hair ribbons streaming behind me as he sang _“_ _Who'll rise or fall, give his all, for America?”_

He stayed in the Army after the War, especially since it wasn't clear whether or not we were about to go to War with the Soviets. When Korea rolled around, he pulled strings to get sent overseas (he was in his 40s by then, married with a toddler. Not exactly the kind of soldier who was going to be shipped out). He always felt he hadn't done his duty fully during the War since he'd never left American soil. You see, he had been in the Quartermaster Corps, European Invasion, First Army. He knew just about every supply route Allied Forces was using in Europe leading up to and after D-Day and thus was considered a capture risk. It wasn't mission critical for him to be over there so he was required to stay in the Lower 48. I think there was a part of him that was ashamed of this. 

Eventually, he was injured and came home. But he pulled more strings and got sent there a second time and was injured again and was put back together by a M*A*S*H unit and sent home yet again. Christ, the things my mother must have said to him ought not to be printed. He came home on Christmas Eve, in the middle of a snowstorm. The taxi couldn't get to our house because the streets hadn't been cleared yet, so he walked about a mile in the driving snow, hauling his dufflebag over his shoulder. When he walked in the front door, I saw a man covered in snow, with a big pack on his back and, like any self-respecting toddler, immediately came to the conclusion that Santa Claus had come just for me. Norman Rockwell couldn't have painted it better. 

And things were good for a little while. Then one morning when I was three years old he left for work and I never saw him again. I remember playing in the living room when his commanding officer and a chaplain came to the house. Later, my mother told me he'd had a heart attack. 

There was always a strange tension around his death, like there was more to the story. And part of me never really accepted that he was dead. I spent years looking at men on the street, trying to find him, wondering if he was still out there. I think that’s why I got into consuming spy thrillers – _The Man from U.N.C.L.E_ , Le Carré, later Clancy - the ‘60s were drenched in that genre. I don't know if I would have consciously admitted it as a teenager, but there was a part of me that looked to those books as a type of confirmation, that the daydreams I’d been spinning in my head since I was three where my father was on some kind of special assignment, in deep cover, biding his time until the mission was complete and he could reveal himself to us, was actually somehow, improbably, completely possible. 

That all changed the summer of 1970, when, on the cusp of adulthood, I was riffling through a box of my mother’s old papers and found his death certificate. “Self-inflicted gunshot to the cranium”. Sure, my dad _had_ gone into cardiac arrest, but only after he’d put a bullet in his head. He'd never even left base. 

There had been no note. I’ve been told most suicides rarely include a note, unlike what you see on TV. Years later, when I finally confronted my mother about it, she had no additional information. And when we requested a copy of his service record we were told it had been one of the millions destroyed in the National Personnel Records Center fire in 1973. So, no answers there either.

I suppose I still could have still found a way to work this little twist into the story I’d been so doggedly crafting – maybe my father was killed because he knew too much, or maybe he’d faked his death and disappeared to protect us and even now was anonymously living out the rest of his life in Brazil. But whichever direction the plot took, the book still ended the same way, he was still gone. And after that I didn’t have the heart to spin conspiracy theories. I don't know what hurt more, that I'd been lied to or that my fantasy was destroyed. He really wasn't going to come home ever again. 

We Boomers had mixed feelings about you during the ‘60s-‘70s, Captain Rogers. On the one hand, you were “The Man”, the guy our recruiting offices tried to hold up as an example so that we’d do our duty in Vietnam. But on the other hand, for reasons I can't explain, you still felt like one of us somehow. The stars and stripes we grew up with. Do you know there's a motorcycle in the movie _Easy Rider_ named after you? Do you know I saw your shield spray painted on roadcases, backstage at rock concerts in the ‘70s? Yeah, it shouldn't have made sense but we still loved you. 

It's been a long time since I wrote a letter to Santa. I don't think growing up I could ever have believed I'd write a letter to you. I still have that record, the one my daddy gave me for my birthday. I still know that song by heart. My daddy was real, even for a brief moment in my life. Now you’re real again, and not only in the way that Santa is real, not only as an embodiment of belief and love but actually lives-across-the river-in-Brooklyn real.

Captain Rogers, if you could die a soldier and come back again, all these decades later, is there a chance my daddy could too? Is there a chance he cheated death and really was out there, deep undercover all this time? Maybe this year he could finally come home for Christmas, pack on his back and covered in snow? 

I've been really good this year. 

Sincerely,

Just a kid from the Lower East Side 


End file.
